Use Tracking Skills to Protect Your Property

1. What they did

Freddy Osuna, who teaches combat and visual tracking to military and law enforcement agencies, wrote this magazine article to make homeowners “track aware”. He explains how ordinary people can use tracking skills to notice unwelcome visitors around their home, deter them, and work out who has been there. He describes his own routine of setting and checking “track traps” around his property and keeping a catalogue of the footprints of people who belong there.

2. What they found

Track traps

• A track trap is any surface that shows a human footprint. It can be as small as a dime, such as a patch of soil left on concrete after rain, and it can be natural or man-made, such as sand or vehicle fluids.
• First identify every avenue of approach to the home, and make sure each has enough track traps that anyone using it would likely step on one. You can add track traps where there are too few.
• Proximal track traps sit near entry points: the bottom of steps, near doors, below windows, and at the choke points that funnel visitors towards doors. They see a lot of family traffic, so they need a lot of upkeep.
• Distal track traps sit at the edges of the property, such as the driveway and the easiest routes onto the land. They see less traffic, mostly in and out, and are larger, so they can give more information. The aim is to link anyone who enters with an entry or viewing point into the house.
• The author “drags” these areas with a rake to erase old marks, so he knows exactly how long any new tracks have been there. On a large property, a vehicle can drag something like a tree branch.
• Most burglaries happen in daylight, when an intruder would act like any visitor. At night, people wanting to stay unseen keep to shadows, alleys and easements, hop walls and fences, and avoid light. The author suggests checking your own property after dark, with the home in its normal evening state, and sketching from above the areas to monitor.

What a footprint can reveal

• Intent: where the track is. Solicitors go to the front door; people looking in windows or going to side doors are behaving differently.
• Height: a tracker brackets height from shoe size, stride, gait and other marks. One technique is to divide the print length in inches by 2. A size 12 print generally belongs to a man of average height, between 5 feet 10 inches and 6 feet. Print length does not match shoe size directly: an insulated winter boot leaves a bigger print than a running shoe of the same size, so practice with different footwear is needed.
• Gender: the most common sense methods are shoe size and shoe type.
• Weight: very difficult, but with much practice an estimate within 20 lb is possible, from the stride length during a natural walk, the straddle (the gap between the inside edges of the feet) when walking and standing, and the single footprint. The average stride is 30 inches, ranging from 26 to 34 inches. Weight shows in the floor and the wall of the track, as pressure rolls from the heel along the outside of the foot, past the arch to the ball, and to the inside behind the big toe before the toe pushes off.

Footprint log

Keep a catalogue of the footprints of family members and regular visitors, with names and the make and model of their shoes, by sketching, photographing or stamping their prints. A quick method is to have a visitor step on a piece of tin foil on carpet. Update the catalogue as new people visit, new shoes are bought and children grow. An unfamiliar pattern can then be checked against it.

The article also shows a chart of 16 sole patterns and two tables of shoe size against height, for 399 males and 101 females, which the text does not discuss or source.

3. What they concluded

• With practice, a lot can be learned from even partial prints and other signs.
• Tracking awareness has benefits in many areas of life: finding help in an emergency, finding food, water and shelter in a survival situation, and finding or evading adversaries.
• Using these skills around the home adds a layer of security, and is a chance to practise a complex, perishable skill and share it with family.

4. How tracking was or was not used

The whole article is about human tracking: reading footprints in prepared and natural track traps, aging tracks by clearing the ground, estimating height, gender and weight from prints, stride and straddle, and identifying individuals by their footwear. No study was carried out; the methods come from the author’s own practice.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• Raking or dragging the ground (by hand, or with a branch behind an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) or truck) to make clean track traps that show when tracks were made.
• A footwear catalogue built from sketches, photographs and tin foil impressions.
• An overhead sketch of the property marking the areas to monitor.